N an oft-quoted passage, the Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta refers to the empires of Byzantium and Persia as “the two eyes of the world,” the divinely ordained realms responsible for maintaining order and civilization amid a sea of inferior untrustworthy barbarians. Of “the Saracen tribe,” for example, he writes that they were “most unreliable and fickle; their mind is not steadfast and their judgement is not grounded in prudence.”1 They needed to be kept in check so that justice and harmony could reign, but they were not a serious problem, for the two empires would always prevail. And yet this comfortable world order, which had endured so long, was suddenly turned upside down by the Arab conquerors not long after Theophylact had finished his work sometime in the 620s. In the end, he had no successor; the genre of secular history, going back more than a thousand years to Thucydides, came to an abrupt end, as though in sympathy with the way of life that it had so well described and now was no more.
This and a number of other seemingly dramatic changes, in particular the rise of the new religion of Islam, have led many scholars to see the Arab conquests as the last nail in the coffin of the classical world and as the herald of a medieval society. This was the view of the Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne, who let the western (Germanic) “barbarians” off the hook, arguing, against the English historian Edward Gibbon, that they were responsible for extending the life of the Roman Empire and not for destroying it. The fifth and sixth centuries could now be rehabilitated and rebranded as an age when classical values remained in vogue, reshaped by Christianity and the “barbarian” customs of the likes of the Franks, Goths, and Lombards, but certainly not effaced. Accordingly the somber epithet of Dark Ages could now be replaced by the cheery sobriquet of Late Antiquity. However, the eastern (Arab) “barbarians” became Pirenne’s bete noire. The Arab capture of North Africa and the Levant made the Mediterranean into a barrier rather than a conduit, so Pirenne maintained, and thus southern Europe was cut off from the east, causing it to stagnate. On the plus side, however, the Arabs kept Byzantium busy and this allowed new forms of statehood to blossom in northern Europe, culminating in the Carolingian Empire.2
Islamic historians have also tended to see the Arab conquests as a turning point, though from their perspective it is the beginning of the new and not the end of the old. In this they are governed by medieval Muslim sources, which reset the clock and made the establishment of the prophet Muhammad’s polity and the launch of the Arab conquests the starting point for Islamic history. These sources, mostly composed by writers living in Iraq in the ninth and tenth centuries, have no acquaintance or sympathy with the Late Antique world that the Arabs overran and pay little heed to it in their writings, thus reinforcing the sense that when one travels from the pre-conquest Middle East of Theophylact Simocatta and enters the post-conquest world of the first Muslim rulers, one is crossing a watershed, exchanging one society for a totally different one. This is of course merely an illusion of the sources, but unfortunately it is made concrete by the fact that two different sets of modern historians (Late Romanists and Early Islamicists) with very different agendas, linguistic skills, and suppositions work either side of the divide. It is the aim of this book to try to smooth out this artificial rupture, to focus on continuities as well as changes, on processes as well as events. This can only be achieved by first understanding what went before, and this is the subject of the rest of this chapter, for, as with all world-changing phenomena, there was a long buildup to the event, a lengthy period in which key transformations took place in the Middle East that made the conquests both possible and likely.
World History
